Epsom Girls Grammar is set to offer its students Cambridge exams in 2026, as another top Auckland principal worries high schools are increasingly “abandoning” the national curriculum.
Epsom Girls Grammar announced in May it would start its Cambridge International pilot next year after being flooded with “overwhelming community demand”.
Mount Albert Grammar School principal Patrick Drumm says his school is another coming under growing pressure to offer Cambridge exams from parents concerned the NCEA lacked “rigour”.
About one-third of Year 11 students didn’t even sit the full NCEA level 1 last year, he said.
Epsom Girls’ decision came after a compelling plea from a Year 9 student, who approached principal Brenda McNaughton one lunchtime.
The girl told McNaughton she loved Epsom Girls’, having made lots of friends and joined a host of sports teams.
However, she was upset because her father planned to move her to a different school in Year 11 to study Cambridge.
“She pleaded with us to consider offering it immediately so that she could stay here at Epsom,” McNaughton said in a video posted to the school’s website in which she explained Cambridge would be offered alongside NCEA.
The NCEA exodus comes as New Zealand’s national study programme faces one of its biggest challenges in two decades, with a quarter of high schools now offering Cambridge International exams or other alternatives.
Cambridge reported student numbers sitting its assessments jumped nearly 20% last year to 8000 pupils.
The Government also recently brought in education reforms, in part triggered by employer complaints in the late 2010s that NCEA Level 1 graduates often couldn’t read, write or do simple maths.
That led to students being required to pass new online literacy and numeracy tests in order to gain their NCEA qualification.
However, it hasn’t gone smoothly, with some principals fearing students may soon needlessly fail their NCEA qualifications because of “poorly” designed tests.
NCEA Level 1 failure rates jumped from 18% in 2023 to 30% in 2024, with more than half of students from low-income schools failing reading and writing, and nearly three-quarters failing numeracy.
Drumm said schools’ low confidence in the tests meant an estimated 30,000 Year 11 students didn’t take NCEA last year.
It’s an “abandonment really” of the national qualification, he said.
The veteran principal of 17 years was especially critical of how NCEA had failed to help students from less advantaged backgrounds improve their chances of making it to university.
“A young person is almost three times more likely to gain University Entrance in a school serving a high socioeconomic community,” he said.
Drumm also delivered a scathing assessment of NZQA’s latest 112-page annual report – the official benchmark report into what is and isn’t working in New Zealand’s senior education system.
“I spoke to colleagues who haven’t even bothered to really turn the front cover of that report,” he said.
“It just comes in and goes straight into the filing cabinet.”
Drumm was hopeful the renewed focus on numeracy and literacy would improve parents’ faith in NCEA, but not all principals shared his optimism.
Papakura High School principal Simon Craggs said the new tests were poorly designed.
In many cases, they focused on skills most students wouldn’t even use in their adult lives.
That included memorising the technical rules of grammar, he said.
“Most adults, including professional people, would fail [the tests],” he said.
“I know of a principal who sat it and failed – it doesn’t mean they’re illiterate.”
Education researcher Michael Johnston, from the NZ Initiative, helped bring in the new tests, having stated too much focus was being put on internal essays and assignments.
He recently told RNZ that internal assessments had exhibited what he called “grade inflation”.
That meant schools had increasingly been giving higher marks to students for internal assessments, while exam marks over the same period had stayed the same.
He told RNZ he thought this was because schools had an incentive to mark their students higher or set more favourable conditions for internal assignments.
Exams, on the other hand, were a more standardised way to measure students.
However, Craggs pushed back on that.
He said he remembered instances under the old exam system where students were asked to write essays about giving speeches.
They were able to score highly in the exams despite having never even given a speech themselves, he said.
Students could also spend most of the year doing nothing and then cram for exams in the last few weeks and still do well.
He argued internal assessments helped students get greater guidance from teachers, keep busy through the entire year and develop skills such as relationship-building and an ability to work in teams.
According to some studies, these latter skills could be a more important measure of whether someone was going to be successful in their careers than intelligence or good grades alone.
The move to Cambridge exams was not all one-way traffic either, he said.
He pointed to Westlake Boys’ High School, which had moved back to NCEA after previously offering Cambridge.
The Ministry of Education, meanwhile, acknowledged there had been challenges introducing the new NCEA Level 1 tests.
Pauline Cleaver, acting leader of the ministry’s curriculum centre, said the Government was working to ensure the national qualification became “robust, credible, and aligned with international standards”.
“We’re listening and committed to doing better,” she said.
Her team was “focused on creating a knowledge-rich curriculum that’s grounded in the science of learning”, she said.
Jann Marshall, deputy chief executive of the NZQA, also said her team were “committed to continually improving” the way NZQA presented information about the successes and failures of the nation’s education system.
The agency worked with schools to adapt how it presented its data, she said.
Drumm, for his part, remained hopeful that current reforms could bring more “confidence” back to the NCEA.
He pointed to last week’s Herald report about the success of the Shen brothers – two ex-Mount Albert Grammar students who won scholarships to top US universities – as proof the NCEA can work.
However, he warned the window for broader NCEA improvement would be closing if schools kept facing mounting community pressure to abandon it.
That could spawn a two-tier education system, with greater disparity between the haves and have-nots.
Reform “can’t come soon enough for our young people”, he said.
“And if we get it right, then maybe future NZQA reports could be worth the read.”
2024 NCEA by the numbers:
2024 NZ Scholarship by the numbers:
Epsom Girls Grammar and the Cambridge International qualification: